Remember back when we were discussing Montague John Druitt and we learned it’s bad luck to have died shortly after the Ripper murders were “finished”? James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton merchant, had some of that same luck, except “died” doesn’t quite fit here. His wife was convicted of his murder and sentenced to death.
Florence Chandler was 18 when she met 42-year-old Maybrick on a sea voyage to Liverpool. It lasted six days, which was long enough for the couple to go from strangers to being engaged. They married in 1881 and had two children by 1886. He had multiple mistresses; she had at least one affair. He sickened suddenly in late April 1889 and died 15 days later. The inquest declared it was arsenic poisoning. Florence became the key suspect.
The trial was sensational, especially since this was an American woman, and the judge’s conduct in particular likely led to her death sentence being commuted to life in prison. In 1904 the case was reexamined and Florence was released. She was the more interesting Maybrick until 1992, when “the Ripper diary” hit headlines.
The provenance of the book is confusing, especially since the story has changed a few times. The contents aren’t really any more enlightening, since the author of the diary never gives his own name. He claims responsibility for the murders of the Canonical Five, as well as two others. And apparently this anonymous author is supposed to be James Maybrick.
The “diary” surfaced in 1992 and has been subjected to multiple tests to determine whether the ink could have been used in 1888. The book itself is less controversial, since the binding and the pages are apparently of the correct vintage, but someone could have found the book and then written the story themselves much later. Some of the details “the Ripper” provides about the murders are inaccurate, but align with oft-repeated parts of the story that someone who was not the Ripper might have heard in the decades since. In fact, the owner of the diary made a statement in 1995 that his wife actually wrote the diary while he dictated. (His solicitor submitted a repudiation of this affidavit, and then he withdrew the repudiation. Just to make things even more confusing.)
The idea seems to be that James Maybrick embarked on the murders as a reaction to his wife’s infidelities, even though it seems that she only began her affair after he had continually cheated on her with multiple women. I suppose we can counter these double standards by arguing that she murdered him when she found out he was murdering other people, even though a twenty-first inquiry into the case revealed that Maybrick was taking multiple medications at the time of his death, most of which were poisonous. It’s highly unlikely Florence Maybrick killed her husband, and it’s also highly unlikely that James Maybrick was Jack the Ripper.
But the diary isn’t the only piece of evidence that surfaced naming the previously unsuspected Maybrick. In 1993, a year after the diary was presented to the world, a man named Albert Johnson bought an antique pocket watch with a strange etching inside. Someone had scratched in the initials of the Canonical Five women (not including the two unidentified women from the diary), James Maybrick’s signature, and the words “I am Jack.” Separate examinations determined that the scratches were not recent – say, if someone had come across the diary story in 1992 and decided to fake them on an true antique watch – but the timing is still puzzling. If Maybrick was a Ripper “nobody” until the diary surfaced in 1992 because it reached the hands of a new owner, how coincidental is it that the pocket watch also changed hands and came to light a year later?
The diary made a splash in the 1990s with books arguing both for and against its authenticity, but it – and James Maybrick – has been largely dismissed by those studying the case. If the Ripper had left a diary for us to find, that would have been big news indeed – even bigger if he’d gotten all the details right and actually signed his name. But the diary goes the way of the shawl and the letters: an interesting splash for experts to argue over, but ultimately not the key to unlock the mystery.
Have you heard about the Ripper diary and the pocket watch? What did you think when you first learned about them? (Does Jack the Ripper strike you as the type to keep a diary in the first place?)
Rebecca Frost 
It was James Maybrick.
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I have had an inkling it was Maybrick since the first few years of this century. I found him on a website which mentioned his alleged diary. I later found that his supposed pocket watch found revealed by a man named Alfred Johnson, with Maybrick’s supposed initials with ‘I am Jack’ and the initials of all five victims. For years I had been in the belief it was he who committed the murders and read ‘The Diary of Jack the Ripper’ and a future corresponding book called ‘Ripper Diary.’ It seemed like it could have been truly real, and I still believe it can’t be dismissed as evidence. However, the diary can also look less convincing to people for the following reasons: 1) the From Boss letter, the Saucy Jacky postcard and the From Hell letter do not seem to fit the handwriting of the diary (even if the From Hell letter may have been written by killer himself, citing there was a kidney with it in a box sent to George Lusk)and it is not known if any of the letters fit his handwriting, 2) Maybrick’s age was that of 50 at the time of the murders and typical suspects fit between the ages of 35 and 40, 3) he didn’t seem to fit the model of a suspect with a minor or no public education as a suspect here would, 4) Charles Lechmere’s (aka Charles Cross) discovery of the body so quickly after the murder makes it seem like the killer ‘found’ the body first and 5) Maybrick was addicted to Arsenic which later kill him the following year, though it was suggested to be accidental, as diarist admitted to giving up arsenic before then. However, here are some other reasons people will believe the diary: 1) his family crest said ‘Time reveals all’, 2) his brother Michael, under the pseudonym Stephen Adams, was a known Victorian composer wrote such songs as ‘The Holy City’ and ‘We All Love Jack,’ 3) he was once married to a woman who had a connection to the East End and was said to have had a mistress in Whitechapel, 4) the letter ‘M’ was on the person of three of the victims, Chapman (2, on an envelope), Eddowes (4, on at least one of her eyelids) and Kelly (5, on the wall beside her bed), but especially Kelly because of the letters ‘FM’, indicating the initials of Maybrick’s own wife Florie, 5) the suspicious sounding behavior of the father of future suspect J.K. Stephen, who was the judge in case against Florie for allegedly killing her husband, through which he turned on her where she got the death penalty (which was commuted in 1904), fulfilling the prediction made by the diarist about Florie ‘suffering’, 6) the mentioning if the cigarette case at the sight of the body of Eddowes, which, like the ‘FM’ initials, was not revealed to the public until 1987 and 6) the fact that Michael Barrett seemed too uneducated to create the diary, thus indicating that it could either be called a forgery shortly after 1987 or a genuine article after all. But my summation is that Maybrick had to have written the diary, but one can deduce that the arsenic may have made him think he was the killer if he is not.
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